


the longer i run, then the less that i find

by lesbinej



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Canonical Character Death, Coping, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Moving On, Not Canon Compliant, THE WAY I HAVE TO GO BACK TO THIS AND ADD, and a singular line that vaguely implies clayleb if you're that desperate, because im a sucker for it, caduceus is the group therapist, canon compliant question mark, im not that far, like maybe not, that parts even canon honestly, theres definitely also a smidgen of beauyasha if u squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24302284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbinej/pseuds/lesbinej
Summary: It's been a year since Mollymauk Tealeaf died, and Yasha is having trouble coping.(title the longer i run/peter bradley adams)
Relationships: Mollymauk Tealeaf & Yasha
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	the longer i run, then the less that i find

**Author's Note:**

> i cant get the tags to work on my phone but basically i wrote this at 3 am and it was mostly for personal cathartic purposes. everythings in character i think but dont be nasty about anything please. no spoilers in the comments. follow me at @beausbian on twitter for updates  
> EDIT: tags are updated to reflect the content.

Night is just starting to creep over the wagon that Caduceus Clay is guiding slowly, and Yasha knows that rest is on everyone’s mind to close out the day that they’ve had. Caleb is leaning against the firbolg’s shoulder, obviously zoned out; the evidence is only solidified by the silvertailed hawk circling the wagon, the same hawk that’s been circling for the past hour, searching for a safe place to pull off the road and set up camp. 

She’s sitting in the back, sharpening the Magician’s Judge, mind and gaze also wandering. It’s probably obvious in that she hasn’t stopped her repetitive motions for several times longer than it would actually take to sharpen and clean her sword. 

She knows Caduceus has one eye on her. He always does. 

Nott and Fjord are flanking the wagon with two matching dappled brown horses that Nott eagerly dubbed Captain (which was short for Captain Crunch, she’s not sure why) and L&E: SVU.

_ “What does that stand for?” Jester had asked. _

_ “Don’t worry about it,” Nott said. _

Most everyone else calls them Captain and V. They’ve been at a slow walk for most of the day, passing the outskirts of Alfield around noon, though they hadn’t stopped. No one was worried about their supplies or needing to stretch, and they were trying to get to Zadash as quickly as they could, at any rate, to collect their payment from the Gentleman. 

Beau and Jester are engaged in some muted conversation that Yasha doesn’t really catch—she tries not to eavesdrop, if she can help it, and it’s actually pretty easy, since listening to conversations is something she has to actively work at. 

And it doesn’t matter, anyway, since she’s scraping her blade with a rock and her gaze is far away, towards the treelines that are again turning orange and brown and brilliant reds, shedding their coats and some trees already beginning to look bare. It’s hauntingly familiar. 

A year. A whole year.

The horses’ hooves are clomping and suddenly, Frumpkin above lets out a cry, and Caleb stirs. 

“Something?” Caduceus asks, in his weird, omniscient way, like he already knows the answer. 

“ _ Ja,  _ just over the hill here. Rock crest.” 

Caduceus nods, serene, and relays the information to the horses. Yasha watches for a moment, always fascinated, and realizes the stone is still in her grasp, knuckles white against it.

“Hey, uh, Yasha?” Beau asks. “You’ve been doing that for like, an hour now.”

She’s just staring, piercing blue eyes like she’s trying to pull information from Yasha’s own—and she knows from experience that with the right pressure points drilled down, the right strikes to her chin and neck, and anything Beau wanted from her, she would have. 

“It’s a good rock,” Yasha mumbles. “…I like my sword very sharp.”

“Yeah.” Gaze doesn’t waver. 

“Yeah.”

“ _ Yashaaaaaaaa,”  _ Jester says in a sing-songy voice, like she always does, but especially when she has a question. “Do you remember last year when we were coming through here and we had to fight all the gnolls after we met you and Molly in the circus and there was the big, um, big frog guy that we had to kill and the dwarf girl who could sing really good and then we came through here and we saved the guy’s bar and we were  _ basically  _ heroes and then we came up here?”

The wave after wave of information laps at Yasha’s brain— “Uh… I don’t remember the gnolls.” 

“You weren’t there for the gnolls. Actually, I don’t think we saw you again until the baths.” Beau glances away, downward. 

“Right. Um… yes, I do remember that.”

Jester grins her doggish grin—Sprinkle’s fur is gently rising and falling behind her neck as he sleeps in the hood of her cloak. “Do you—” and her voice lowers to a whisper “—remember when we named the horses after  _ pooooop. _ ” 

“Yes.” She bites down the small smile that tugs at her lips. 

The horses’ hooves are clattering to a halt— “Woah, Cap’n,” Fjord chides his steed as the Captain shakes his head in protest, a loud snort bellowing from his nostrils. 

“I think that we had a pretty good time last year, don’t you?” Jester’s smile breaks her whole face, ear to ear. “I had a lot of fun killing all of those gnolls and we met you! So I think it was pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Yasha agrees, still far away, and sees Beau seems to have adopted the same look on her face, the look that means she knows Yasha’s eyes are tracing the emerald lines peeking around her neck, the look that means they’re on the same page.

_ Molly.  _

“And… break!” Caduceus announces, climbing off the front of the wagon, Caleb already hopped off to tie the horses to the lone tree at the base of a small rock summit. Wordlessly, Yasha slides the Judge back into its sheath and tucks the rock back into her bag, as Beau leaps nimbly from the back of the wagon, and Jester follows suit, though a little less gracefully. Like a cat, and followed by a dog. Yasha herself climbs out with a heavy  _ flumph,  _ the grizzly bear bringing up the rear of the pack. 

As Caduceus is talking to the horses, and Nott and Caleb enamor themselves in conversation while the wizard threads his silver wire in a circle, and Jester runs to push smaller rocks out of the way, Beau sidesteps to be at Yasha’s elbow. 

“Are you… okay, though?”

Sometimes Yasha is grateful for Beau’s ineloquence—it makes her feel a little more understood in a world that seems to be full of social graces everywhere but her. With Beau, she feels less pressure to speak perfectly, less pressure to be understood. It’s just natural for her. So it’s not uncharacteristic of her to let out a long, low sigh, a mournful bale of a breath. 

“No.”

“…”

“I… miss him.” Even that is so much, so much effort and weight that chokes Yasha. 

Beau’s hand drifts to the back of her neck, where the all-seeing eye stares up at Yasha, unfeeling and cold, outlined in glistening green. 

“Yeah.”  _ Good talk,  _ Yasha’s thinking, but doesn’t say it out loud. “It’s been about a year now.”

“Oh, well…” She tries to play it off like she hadn’t noticed or was thinking about it, but with Beau’s icy eye on hers, it’s hard to lie. “Yeah. Harvest Close soon.”

“Yeah. He had that gaudy tapestry, remember? I think he had sex on it, too.” Beau makes a face. “In the, um… the um…”

“The big inn?”

“Yeah. The Pillow…. Pillow something.” 

“Yeah.”

“Do you… do you know why he got that?”

Yasha takes a moment, rocks to one knee, thinking, cursing her horrible memory. Molly had told her about it a few times, the Platinum Dragon, and she’ll be damned to remember anything now. It’s so hard to think of his voice…

“I think he just liked to live freely, you know? He, um, didn’t really believe in all the things that… well, we do,” and she gestures to herself, and Jester, and Caduceus. “I mean, I’m not a cleric like they are, but I try to keep the Stormlord’s will…”

“Because you owe him. Yeah.”

“Yeah. But he didn’t really follow like that. He liked to do whatever he wanted.”

Beau’s lip quirks. “He didn’t like anybody telling him what to do.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“But he liked the Platinum Dragon because he didn’t have to keep all of the godly things.”

“Makes sense. I don’t really…  _ think  _ about the Knowing Mistress a lot. The Cobalt Soul likes her, but I’m kind of just… here, I guess.”

Yasha shrugs. “I think faith is… very tricky.”

“How so?”

At that moment, a fire sparks a few feet away, and Yasha and Beau turn to see Fjord having coaxes a few flames out of a makeshift fire pit that Jester had shoved together, and Nott excitedly removing some raw meat from her pack and began placing it on the hot rocks, Caduceus coming behind her with a few herbs and spices. 

Beau claps Yasha on the shoulder and walks off. 

It’s been a year. 

—

They’re heading northeast, to Hupperdook for more business with the Gentleman. This time, Yasha is holding the reins while Caduceus dozes on the wagon’s back, Jester guiding V, and Fjord again on Captain. He seems to like that horse.

Beau, Nott, and Caleb are playing a game of cards, though every rock in the road sends them spinning, and Yasha hears repeated slapping every time it’s Caleb’s turn, and Frumpkin’s flight pattern in front of her wobbles. 

“ _ Eh…  _ eights?”

“Go fish,” Nott says. 

Frumpkin steadies, swooping to the east, and Jester detaches herself from that flank to scope out wherever he’s heading. 

The routine continues for the greater part of the day, though as the sun begins to make it’s descent in front of her and to the left a little, and Yasha has to fish out Caduceus’ sun hat to steer correctly, Beau appears under Yasha’s right arm. It still spooks her out how quickly and silently Beau moves around.

“You never answered me.”

Yasha continues staring straight ahead. Beau remains annoyingly there. 

A few minutes pass, and Yasha’s considering pushing her off the wagon, vaguely, when Beau takes out a stack of cards. Molly’s cards. 

“Pull one?”

It’s hard to look at them, hard to look at Molly’s cards in the wrong hands, brown instead of lavender, but she does. The lines are so familiar, the crescent moon carefully painted on the back of each one, lovingly and skillfully made. Seeming to sense Yasha’s interest, Beau cuts the deck like the dealer of a poker game, offering the deck when she finishes. 

Yasha gingerly draws the top card and holds her breath while she turns it over. 

The handwriting of Mollymauk Tealeaf greets her.  _ Justice.  _ The lines of a woman, with scales in one hand and a sword in the other, blinded and standing tall. 

Molly’s voice whispers in her ear: “You’re needing some balance, love.”

Yasha looks up, and it’s no longer Beau holding the cards, but a purple tiefling with long, curling horns jingling with tiny bells, red, pupil-less eyes, and wet hair freshly braided to the nape of his neck. They’re both shirtless, sitting on the grass after a bath in the river, Yasha’s own hair braided back as well.

“This one means that you need some peace in here,” and his fingernail pokes her chest. 

“In my tit?”

Molly shakes his head, laughing. “No, dear. In your soul. You need it bad. And to be honest, I didn’t need the cards to tell me that.”

Yasha rolls her eyes at him. “Okay.”

Beau blinks back at her. “Yasha?”

Yasha’s on the wagon again, reins in her hands, wagon lilting to the right and Jester curving out of her way with a startled look on her face. Jolting, she rights the wagon quickly back on its path, though the horses snort with irritation. 

“Sorry. Long day.”

“Hey, everything okay up here?” Caduceus’ groggy voice calls from the back.

“Yeah, everything’s good.” Beau waves him off. Then, to Yasha, “You got Justice.”

“Yeah. Molly… Molly thinks I need a little peace, I think.”

Beau’s eyebrow arches, stud through it glinting in the evening light. “Don’t we all.”

“That’s true.” 

“The Moon isn’t in the deck. Jester left it for him.”

“She liked that card,” Yasha muses, thinking about the long nights of Molly with a paintbrush and piles of discarded cards, ones that weren’t perfect. She remembers lying next to his feet as he stood and worked, not saying anything, not talking at all. His bells tinkled every so often as he shifted his weight, but otherwise they shared the comfortable silence. Something Yasha misses deeply with a heavy pang in her chest. 

“Yeah. She pulled it twice, I think.”

“I remember him making it.” And it’s true—she had been there during the entire creation of the deck, Molly explaining the meaning of every card in great detail as he sketched the artwork and filled it in with colorful paints. 

Beau takes the deck and shuffles it again, pulling one herself. She turns over the  _ High Priestess,  _ a woman holding a crescent moon in both hands with silver hair cascading down her shoulders. This one had been one of Molly’s favorites to paint with the moon iconography of it. 

“What’s this one mean?”

Yasha gives it a glance over— “Trust your intuition. It’s right.”

Beau is silent for a long moment, mulling, turning it over and over. Finally, she tucks the cards away. Yasha relinquishes the  _ Justice  _ card with hesitance. 

“Do you have anything from him?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you have anything of Molly’s? We kinda… distributed everything, but you knew him longer than any of us…” 

Wordlessly, Yasha reaches into her shirt and pulls out the amulet that has never left her chest, with two pendants dangling from it—the symbol of the Stormlord, four lightning bolts closed in a circle, and a sun with the lower half of a crescent moon. 

“He gave this to me,” she says, and then lets it drop back down. 

Beau doesn’t say anything. 

“I wish I had something else, though.”

“Like what?”

That gives Yasha a pause. What would she want of Molly? As a token? Fjord had his sword, his cloak was left with his body, and Molly wasn’t one for worldly possessions in the first place…

A whisper leaves her mouth: “Anything.”

“Anything?”

“Just… something else. Something more of him.”

Beau nods. “Yeah.” 

She hands Yasha the card deck, but Yasha pushes it away.

“It… No. I can’t have them.”

“You were there when he made them—it just kind of seems fair.”

Yasha shakes her head. “I can’t.”

_ It hurts. It hurts to think about him. It hurts to look at. It hurts to have the reminders of someone you loved when you can’t have them. It hurts it hurts it hurts.  _

They take the rest of the ride in silence. 

—

This time, Fjord drives the wagon, and Yasha is more than a little worried that Captain is going to buckle under her weight. Jester is steering V to the left of her, and Yasha’s mostly left alone with her thoughts, musing on the landscape around them and how it looks so subtly familiar.

As they crest a short hill, Yasha’s struck by the twin summits to either side of the path, and a large, cloven rock a short hundred feet to the west. 

Shock overtaken her limbs, Yasha kicks Captain off the path, ducking back away from the cart and the rushing of blood in her ears drowning the concerned cries from her friends as she hightails it away.

_ Pleasebewrongpleasebewrongpleasebewrong _

Captain skids to a halt and Yasha leaps off without hesitation, sprinting the last few feet to the boulder twice her height, but definitely carved in half, jaggedly, by the blade on Yasha’s own back. She draws the Judge, slowly, almost afraid of it, and holds the sword up to the rock. 

She had cleaved this in a grief-stricken stupor after her friends had left, rampaging the hills and surrounding greenery. There, a few feet away, lies the stump of a grand oak that she had slammed into with nothing but blind rage, anger, grief, madness, and cracked it to its roots. Even now, remembering, it’s almost instinctual as she falls to her knees, barely noticing the necrotic energy that takes her into a chokehold, the familiar skeletal wings sprouting and tensing as she claws the earth with her hands and tears streaking down her cheeks.

Molly. Mollymollymollymolly. He had deserved so much better. He deserved so much more than this. 

Thinking about him now still brings hot tears to the surface, but it doesn’t even matter, it doesn’t. All that matters is that he was there when she needed him, he was there for her when she surely would’ve died alone and wandering and broken, he was there when she needed a brother, a friend, a shoulder, or just someone, anyone. He had taken her madness into his hands and given it back to her, given her power over it, given her something to hold on for. And now he was gone.

Blindly, Yasha stumbles across the plains to the grave that she knows is there, knows belongs to her friend, knows belongs to Mollymauk Tealeaf by the colorful coat still tied to a branch that marks the site, though listed to the side and noticeably aged. A few purple flowers have sprouted around the base of it, though they’re drooping with the change of seasons. Still, they persist, with a white center and four wilting, dark purple petals.

Yasha grasps the branch with both hands, one on top of the other, shaking and falling to her knees again. She dropped the Judge somewhere. She doesn’t even know where. All that matters right now is Molly. Mollymauk, her friend, her life, her only source of joy in a world without her wife or her family, just a strange god and gnawing hunger. Mollymauk. 

She doesn’t know how long she kneels over the grave, doesn’t know how long she stays. She knows, objectively, that the shroud of wings and necrotic energy fades after some time, and she’s just a lone woman, crouching over the grave of a man she loved more deeply than any other person. More than she ever thought herself capable of loving someone, a deep and nourishing and enriching love that left her world hollow and grey once it was ripped from her.

She hears footsteps behind her, doesn’t turn to look, doesn’t move. Two hands, different ones, touch her shoulders.

“Hi, Yasha,” Jester whispers. “I’m really sorry.”

Beau, on Yasha’s left, doesn’t say anything. 

She stays kneeled for another few minutes. 

“He really loved you, you know,” Jester tries again. “He always knew you would come back to us. Even when we left you way far away and went to Zadash.”

“He never doubted you,” Beau says now, soft. “He always knew you could take care of yourself.”

Yasha doesn’t say anything, eyes still squeezed shut. 

“And we love you too.” Jester’s hand squeezes her a little, strong. “We’re not as good as Molly was, but we love you so much and I know you will always come back to us, too. Even when you’re really far away.”

A third pair of footsteps, impossibly light, trace behind Yasha, and a familiar pink braid tickles Yasha’s cheek.

“May I?”

Jester and Beau step back, leaving Yasha with Caduceus at her right side. The firbolg, tall and lanky, kneels down next to her, collapsing himself. 

“I understand how you’re feeling. And I know you don’t want to hear that it’s gonna be okay or anything like that.” Caduceus isn’t looking at her, or the grave, just the horizon line. It somehow eases the tension. “I understand how people work through grief. You think you’re okay, and then all of a sudden, it comes back, like a hot knife you forgot about until it falls and stabs you in the foot. And no matter how many times you try, each time hurts just as badly as the last. And you think you’ll never move on.”

Caduceus doesn’t make any moves of comfort, doesn’t take Yasha’s chin or wipe her tears. Actually, he moves to pluck some of the flowers growing at the base and presses them, gently. Takes the tea set from his back and motions for Caleb to come heat the water. Offers a flower to Yasha. 

After a long moment of Caduceus prepping tea, he drops some of the petals he plucked, perfectly dried by magic, into two teacups, and pours the water overtop, until both cups are filled with steaming tea, faint purple, smelling just barely of lavender. He offers one cup to Yasha, who takes it and tastes it, gingerly. It’s too hot to drink comfortably, but it’s a comforting grounding for her.

“It gets better. It doesn’t heal all the way. It’s like that one ankle you broke three years ago and it just doesn’t ever walk right again. You’re never gonna be the same person that you were before all of this.” Caduceus takes a sip. “But you’re different now. And you’re growing and changing and overcoming this. You’re overcoming it every day. It’s what your friend would want from you. And it’s what you need to do for yourself.”

Yasha blows on her tea a little, now tasting it better—it tastes like herbs and roses, almost, with undertones she doesn’t recognize, but it immediately calms her when she smells it. 

“It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to get angry and upset and all of the things you did just now. Captain doesn’t really appreciate it, but he understood after I talked to him about it. But your friends here love you, and they really want you to be okay. And it’s okay to love them, too. You’re not leaving him behind by it. I know it feels like you might be, but you’re not. And you’re letting him live in everything you do for him, and every time you remember him. He’s not really gone, not forever. Everybody comes back.”

“As tea?” Yasha croaks out, still comprehending everything Caduceus is saying that feels like balm on a hot blister, soothing and cooling and calming.

“As hot, delicious tea,” Caduceus says into his mug. “But also, as everything around us. Your friend is in the dirt that we’re sitting on, in the deer that wander around here, in the mushrooms that grow in caves and forests miles from here. He’s everywhere.”

Yasha nods, slowly, sipping again, hot water running down her throat and somehow convincing her body to slow the tears. 

“And if anything, he loved you very much. That’s obvious. And he wouldn’t want to see you crying like this over him.”

“No,” Yasha agrees, quiet, a smile tugging at her as she thinks about Molly chastising her for letting herself be sad over him, for fussing about him.  _ Everyone’s gonna die someday,  _ he’d say,  _ and I intend to make the most of the time that I have.  _

The pink-haired firbolg in front of her echoes a lot of what she loved about Molly, and she allows herself the short moment of final grief, tears drying in the afternoon air and scent of flowers and herbs wafting over the breeze. Then, Yasha stands up, slowly, draining the last of the tea in her mug and handing it back to Caduceus. 

Caduceus gently puts away his tea set, and with one hand, takes Yasha’s, and with the other, grasps the top of the staff marking Molly’s final resting place. 

“Wildmother, grant this one safe passage. Bless him and bless this earth and make it fertile.” At his words, a small amount of moss grows under his palm, and the purple flowers around the base perk up slightly. 

Yasha watches, still teary-eyed, sniffing once, twice. Cad places his other hand on top of hers wordlessly, holds it for a moment, and then steps away, leaving Yasha with one last moment by herself.

She closes her eyes, willing her thoughts to be still. There’s too much to say, too much that she’s left unsaid this past year, too much she wants. She feels the Stormlord symbol grow hot on her chest, but when she tries to reach out with her thoughts, there’s no answer.

Yasha finally takes both hands and rests them on the branch, on his tattered coat, on the moss grown by Caduceus’ blessing. 

_ Goodbye, Mollymauk Tealeaf.  _

Then, turning away, she walks down the hill to join the others, taking Beau’s hand as she draws near. The group slowly begins their journey again, leaving the twin crests behind them. 

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
